The Oregon State Flag: History, Symbols and Why It Has Two Sides

1925

Year Oregon adopted its state flag

33

Stars, for the 33rd state

1859

Year of statehood, on the front

2

Different sides, the only state flag like it

An indoor Oregon flag with gold fringe stands in our showroom on NW Nela Street, next to a U.S. flag, and people who come in for an awning sample often stop to look at it. It’s worth a closer look. Oregon’s flag is unusual among the fifty, and its story starts in Portland.

What’s on the front

The law that describes the flag, ORS 186.010, is short. One side bears “on a navy blue field the state escutcheon in gold, supported by 33 gold stars and bearing above the escutcheon the words ‘State of Oregon’ in gold and below the escutcheon the figures ‘1859’ in gold.” The same statute names navy blue and gold as Oregon’s official colors.

The escutcheon is the center of the state seal. The 33 stars stand for Oregon’s place as the 33rd state to join the Union, and 1859 is the year it did.

What’s on the back

The other side carries “a representation of the beaver in gold” on the same navy field. The Oregon Encyclopedia describes it as a beaver “perched on a log and facing to the right,” one of Oregon’s state symbols. Oregon is the only state whose flag has a different image on each side.

That has a practical side for a flag maker. Most single-layer flags simply show a mirror image on the back. Oregon’s can’t: the beaver has to be its own side.

A Portland story from 1925

Oregon was among the last states to adopt a flag. According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, it did so only after Portland’s postmaster, J.M. Jones, asked for a flag to present to the U.S. Post Office Department for a display. On February 26, 1925, Governor Walter Pierce signed Senate Bill 195, An Act Adopting a State Flag.

The design was based on Oregon’s nineteenth-century military flag, with different proportions and the beaver added to the back. Adjutant General George A. White asked the Meier & Frank department store in Portland to make the first one, and seamstresses Blanche Cox and Marjorie Kennedy finished it in time for the all-state flag display at the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington in April 1925. A Portland shop, Portland hands, sewing a flag. We feel some kinship with that.

The first flag, lost and found

For decades, the original 1925 flag was thought lost in the 1935 fire that destroyed the state capitol. Then, during a 2008–09 contest run by The Oregonian to redesign the flag, which drew 2,500 entries and changed nothing, the original turned up framed in a stairwell of Pierce Library at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande. Governor Pierce’s grandson had donated it when the library was dedicated in his grandfather’s honor in 1954, the same year this shop opened.

Oregon law has required the state flag to be flown over schools, courthouses and other public buildings since 1953.

Sizes, and flying it with the U.S. flag

The official proportions are 500:833, height to width. In practice, as the Oregon Encyclopedia notes, flags are usually made at 3:5 or 2:3.

Flown with the U.S. flag, the Oregon flag goes below it on a single halyard, or on its own pole to the U.S. flag’s left (your right as you face them). The details are in our flag etiquette guide. The state’s other official symbols are listed in the Oregon Blue Book.

The Oregon state flag is in our state flags collection, alongside flags from other states. Or see it in person at the showroom; flags and flagpoles has the hours and what we carry.